Hotter than hell

‘Ninety-nine percent of New South Wales, which is the country’s most populous state and provides around a quarter of the country’s agricultural output, is currently in drought.’

Sweltering, as we are, in the hottest British summer in a generation, observing as we are scorching temperatures across Europe, everyone, except Donald Trump and Nigel Lawson, now knows that something is up with the weather. Our climate is changing.

Read an expert scientist to read the truth because virtually every scientist on the planet now agrees that claimed change is real and that humans are responsible for changing the climate. It is no longer a matter for debate. I admit that I cannot understand everything that scientists tell me, but I believe that they are telling me the truth. And theirs is the only explanation. The climate change deniers offer no alternative explanation because there isn’t one.

I have friends who live in New South Wales and what is happening to them is truly frightening. They point out to me that it’s actually mid winter in Australia, not the height of summer, as it is here. And they tell me that climate change is not just about record high temperatures. It’s also about too much rain. Extremes are the new norm.

The experts always said that climate change would make the weather more volatile. Single weather episodes could not individually be attributed to climate change, more that changes to weather patterns most certainly could be. And these are the patterns, here, there and everywhere.

The worst thing in the world is to suggest that because some of us – me included – don’t understand all the science, it can’t be true. However, sometimes it is important to acknowledge that experts in their fields know more than we do and it’s important we are able to believe in their findings. This is not easy in a cynical world where no one believes anything anyone says anymore.

Climate change has made the drought in New South Wales ever more likely, as it has our heatwave, as it has the heatwave across Europe. Gravity is a scientific theory in the same way evolution is a theory but we know both are real. And it’s the same with climate change.

Another warning just this morning that our world is heating up at an unsustainable rate and we need to make real changes not at some date in the future but in the here and now. The decisions we make today, as with Brexit, are the ones which will affect the next generation more than mine. We have already voted to gamble away our children’s futures in Europe. Let’s hope we don’t gamble away their lives, too.